In recent decades, hundreds of millions of people across the globe have been uprooted from their homes by poverty, wars and repression. Some flee to save their lives; others risk their lives to escape destitution. Most end up in refugee camps or in the slums of Third World cities; a lucky few find a better life in an affluent country far from their own. All in their different ways are at the mercy of economic and political forces beyond their control.

The global economic change deepening rural poverty in much of the Third World, peasant migration is creating gargantuan ungovernable cities.

Almost everything that happens on earth is somehow connected. We are all affected by the widening gap between rich and poor, by population growth, by the mechanization of agriculture, by destruction of the environment, by bigotry exploited for political ends. The people wrenched from their homes are simply the most visible victims of a global convulsion.